Everyone should get tested.  Just saying…

Via XKCD…

So I’m walking to class in one of my old Junior High Schools (they call them Middle Schools these days…).  The bad one.  The one I got bullied in so much I actually skipped out some days.  I had a hideout in the corner of one of the apartment building basements where the tenants could store things.  I’d found a storage bin that wasn’t being used and set up a bunch of big old cardboard boxes and some carpet and a flashlight in it, and brought in some books to read and on days when it was really bad I went and hid there until after school let out.  That was the only time in my life I ever skipped school, but some days it was just too much.  Surprisingly, nobody at the school ever questioned my occasional unexcused absences either.  In retrospect, it was of a piece with the administration’s lackadaisical attitude toward discipline.  Bullies at that school essentially had free reign.  Nobody was ever punished for picking on the smaller kids.  And sometimes I saw the smaller ones dragged into the principle’s office for fighting back.

Anyway…  So I’m walking to class in this Junior High School.  At least…I think it’s that one.  Something about it is different.  Odd.  The halls seem the same, and yet different somehow.  And then I realize I’m naked.  

You’ve all had this dream…right?  You’re in school and you’re naked and suddenly you realize that fact and you spend the rest of the dream dying of embarrassment.  I’m walking to class and I realize I’ve forgotten, somehow, to put my clothes on (maybe I’d just left gym class and forgot to dress after showering or something…) and now I’m trying hard to find my locker so I can put something on and then maybe…I dunno…flee the school or something.

But then I realize I’m dreaming and it gets odder.  Somehow I know that I’m dreaming and I’m walking in the geek wing of the school…where all the geek kids go.  And what is more, it’s the geek wing in a school where everyone goes when they’re dreaming about being back in school.  So I’m walking down the hall without a stitch on and trying not to make eye contact with anyone, and I see another kid walk past me the other way also trying not to make eye contact, and he’s only wearing his pajamas, and I’m thinking Okay…that kid’s having an "I’m in school in my pajamas" dream.  Then along comes another kid with her hair a really gross shade of green and I’m thinking She’s having her Bad Hair Day In School dream.  Another kid is struggling with his locker door and I think He’s having a Can’t Remember My Locker Combination And I Have A Final In Two Minutes dream…

Eventually I get to the door to my classroom and I see a rack of towels beside it with a sign that says Naked Dream – Self Serve, and I grab one and wrap it around my waist, walk inside and sit down to take a test.  Nobody pays me the slightest attention as I walk to my desk.  After I woke up I couldn’t recall what the test was about.

My dreams get like this sometimes.  Really.  In some Twilight Zone dream school there is a wing where all the geek kids go to have their tormented dreams about school.  But the administration provides towels.  So maybe it’s where uncaring school principles and teachers are sent to try and make amends. 

A huge meat eating plant has been discovered in the Philippines…

A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in the highlands of the central Philippines.

The pitcher plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is so big that it can catch rats as well as insects in its leafy trap.

There’s a photo of it on the BBC site.  I used to grow pitcher plants and Venus fly traps, but these kinds of plants don’t take well to the Mid-Atlantic climate (they are tropical plants mostly) and I gave it up.  But this one seems to grow at high altitudes which can’t be all that hot.  Be nice if we could get it to grow in here in Baltimore.  I could grow a bunch of them around my garden and not have to worry about rats going after my bird feeders.

…the Japanese ones anyway.

Niigata Bust Pudding from Japan

Nothing more appropriate for our blog than sexy things you can eat. Japanese brand Niigata makes a pudding packaged inside a pair of tits with some caramel dipping sauce. YUHMM

I’m guessing the pudding tastes like spackling compound so they packaged it in a cup that looks like a female’s breast on the theory that sex can sell anything, even pudding that tastes like spackling compound.  But who knows…maybe it’s perfectly decent pudding and some guys just like having it served to them in little tit shaped cups.  I’m still trying to figure out that inflatable tits in a box for boys thing…

I have this quirky sense of humor that (I think) alternately charms and appalls my friends.  The problem with being a nerd is you never quite know for sure when you’ve taken it too far until your friends are giving you that Oh Do Grow Up look again.  There is some subtle social sensibility you are missing, which prevents you from stumbling across the line from smart and funny into dumb and annoying. 

I have to admit…I was tempted when I saw This.  Oh…very tempted…

Novelty Bavarian Lederhosen With Yodeling Frankfurter Controls: Hurry!

Each 6-inch tall plastic pair of Bavarian Remote Control Lederhosen is activated by an infrared remote control knockwurst.  Press the button and the self propelled Lederhosen hops around and sings a merry yodel.

You can have your very own Bavarian Remote Control Lederhosen for $19.49.  Requires two AAA batteries.  Knockwurst remote control operates your Lederhosen to within 10 feet.

He’d probably never speak to me again…

Via SLOG.  Poor little guy just couldn’t wait for Oktoberfest…

Drunk badger blocks traffic

Road kill reported by a driver in the German state of Lower Saxony turned out to be a drunk badger taking a nap, police in Goslar reported on Wednesday morning.

Late on Monday night, a driver reported what he thought was a dead animal on county road 32 near Groß Döhren to police.

But when officers arrived on the scene to remove the traffic obstruction, they were stunned to find that the animal was not dead or injured.

“Right in the middle of the street there was a badger sitting and staring at the officers incredulously,” a police statement said.

The officers quickly discovered that the animal – which was not frightened by their presence – had been snacking on the overripe cherries on a nearby tree.

“The animal’s belly digested the fruit to alcohol and the badger was, as the saying goes, ‘drunk as a blackbird’,” the statement said, adding that the little mammal was also suffering from “diarrhoea containing cherry pits.”

Officers directed the badger off of the road, where he could “sleep off his intoxication in a meadow.”

–The Local, Germany

Well of course they let it go on its way.  Who wants to arrest a badger for public drunkenness?  You’d get your hands chewed off.

Good thing it was the happy peaceful kind of drunk and not the loud belligerent kind.  Just imagine walking home from a night out at the bars and suddenly encountering a drunken pissed off badger…

So I get to work, and immediately after settling into my office, go wash my hands before I touch anything on my desk.  I mean…since I’ve had to touch all the door knobs on the way to my desk.  And as I’m washing, I’m thinking…

Remember Y2K?  Remember how it turned out to be no big deal after all.  That wasn’t because it wasn’t any big deal.  It actually was.  If nothing had been done, guarantee you nothing would have worked by the time the calendar rolled over to the year 2000.  Actually, things would have begun to fail Much sooner, since all the programs that calculate things like morgages and car loans and credit card exparation dates would have begun to fail years ahead of Y2K.  But never mind that.  If nothing had been fixed, nothing would have worked.  We computer professionals took the warnings seriously, and got to work, and Fixed The Problem.  And when the magic night came along, it wasn’t much of a problem after all.  Thanks to us.  And what did we get for our trouble?  A lot of grief about how we’d scared the whole damn world for nothing.

Now it’s Swine Flu.  Excuse me…Industrial…Pig Farm…Flu.   Everybody’s gotten the message.  A Dangerous Flu Is Spreading…  Take Precautions…  Be Alert…  Good Hygiene Is The Best Defense…  Suppose it works.  Suppose that enough people take the message about good hygiene seriously enough, and government health agencies take the threat seriously enough, that this flu does not spread so rapidly, and not so many people die of it.  Will we all say afterward that the threat was overblown?

Yeah…probably…

Via Slashdot…  This scanned across my computer screen today…

The Manga Guide To Databases

Princess Ruruna, of the Kingdom of Kod, has a problem. Her parents, the King and Queen, have left to travel abroad. Ruruna has been left to manage the nations fruit business. Much is at stake, Kod is known as "The Country of Fruit." Ruruna is not happy though, as she is swamped by paperwork and information overload. A mysterious book, sent by her father, contains Tico the fairy. Tico, and the supernatural book are going to help Princess Ruruna solve her problems with the power of the database. This is the setting for all that takes place in The Manga Guide to Databases. If you are like me and learned things like normalization and set operations from a rather dry text book, you may be quite entertained by the contents of this book. If you would like to teach others about creating and using relational databases and you want it to be fun, this book may be exactly what you need.

Er…  Right.  It’s Monday morning…it’s gray and rainy and chilly just like it’s been now for days and days…  I’m tired, I’m about to go nuts with all this damn rain all the damn time…and this pops up on my computer screen.  A Manga.  About a princess.  In the Country of Fruit.  Suffering from information overload.  Swamped with database problems.  Rescued in the nick of time by Tico The Fairy.  I had to stare at this for a few seconds while my brain kept insisting that I was going to wake up any moment now and Monday would begin for real this time…

If this post is confusing you…don’t worry.  There’s an in-joke staring me in the face that I just can’t even think about clarifying here.

[Geek Alert…]

When I’m working with my hands, and trying to completely focus my mind on what my fingers are doing, I’ll close my eyes, so as to tune out the visual, in favor of the tactile. This is something I’ve done ever since I was a kid working on a new model car or a slot car or a Heathkit assembly.  It’s a reflex, something akin I think to how I sometimes stare off into nowhere when I’m concentrating on something someone is saying to me.

So I’m in the darkroom trying to load some film into the tank.  I had a roll of sprocket damaged film I was trying to get onto a developing reel and because it was damaged it was fighting me.  I kept trying to wind it, and felt it kinking and knew that it had jumped the track, rewound and started over.  It was getting frustrating.  I realized in the middle of all this that I’m closing my eyes to concentrate on the feel of the film going into the reel.  Yet I was doing this in complete darkness anyway.  There couldn’t have been anything more superfluous just then, then closing my eyes.  Yet I kept on doing it.  Even when I realized I was doing it, and thought to stop myself.  I couldn’t concentrate on not closing my eyes, and getting the film wound correctly at the same time.  So I stopped fighting my eyelids and focused my attention on getting the film wound. 

I don’t think that’s a habit I got into.  It’s some sort of brain reflex.

I’m listening to my German language audio files.  I’m dutifully repeating the words and phrases as I am instructed.  I am actually getting these first baby steps in the course right most of the time now…

Ask me if I understand English.

Verstehen Sie Englisch?

Ask me if I understand German.

Verstehen Sie Deutsch?

Tell me you understand no German.

Ich verstehe kein Deutsch.

While I am dutifully repeating all this on command, it occurs to me that telling someone you know no German in German is a tad contradictory. It further occurs to me that asking a person who knows no German to say how they would inform someone they know no German, in German, is ridiculous. 

But I press onward…

Memo to self: Don’t get a PayPal debit card…

Driver Fills up Gas Tank, Receives Bill For $81 Billion

When Juan Zamora stopped to refuel his car at a Conoco service station in Richland, the gas pump’s calculator registered a total fee of $26.

But in a freak computer hiccup, the PayPal debit card he used recorded the transaction as $81,400,836,908. Yes, you read that correctly, that’s more than 81 billion dollars.

Initially, Mr. Zamora thought it must’ve been a joke. But after contacting PayPal customer service he was surprised to see that the company treated it as anything but a laughing matter.

“Somebody from a foreign country who spoke in broken English argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes,” Zamora said. ” ‘Did you get the gas?’ he asked. Like I had to prove that I didn’t pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!”

This is more understandable then it looks.  If PayPal is outsourcing its customer service to Zimbabwe then the rep would have had no trouble believing you’d bought eighty-one billion dollars worth of gas.

So I’m trying to learn German.  It isn’t logical since, living here in North America, the sensible second language for me to try to pick up is Spanish.  But the illogical motivation is way stronger then the logical one and I know when to give in.  It’s not just a certain someone I know.  I get intensely curious about a thing and then it becomes an obsession.  Photography was like that.  And computers.  Everyone who knows me knows how I get when something grabs my attention. 

German is a puzzle.  In a way that Spanish just isn’t.  I was down in Mexico last year for the first time and while I could barely speak a word of it, I found it wasn’t too terribly hard to intuit the meanings of some words and phrases.  In part, living here in North America, I have been exposed to a lot of fractured Spanish.  Amigo.  Gracious.  Por Favor.  Dónde está el baño?  But I also found I could read things like signs down there pretty well, even for words I would have had no clue about. 

For example.  It was hot down in Puerto Vallarta and I wore my sandals a lot as I strolled through the town with my camera.  They were a new pair…I’d bought them down in Key West just a few months previously.  So I was still breaking them in.  I noticed one morning I was starting to get a blister on one heel.  The last thing I wanted was something to keep me from walking around comfortably, so I started looking around for a place that sold bandages ("patches", as I’m told the English call them…).  The local convenience store chain, OXXO, which was everywhere down there, didn’t seem to have any.  I wandered around for a bit and then I saw a little store tucked in the middle of a block with a sign above it that read: Farmacia.

Hmmm…sounds like "Pharmacy"…  And so it was.   I wandered in and saw a shop that differed little from any small in town U.S. drugstore I’d ever seen, other then some of the brands were unfamiliar.  Now then…let me go to Google and get a quick translation of pharmacy in German.  Ah…Apotheke… 

Well…actually I think I’d have figured that one out too.  But the point is many common Spanish words sound like English words.  I don’t need that.  No necesito que.  German, not so much.  And I’ve spent my entire life with Spanish hovering in the background.  Half my family tree is in California.  I am no where near conversant in Spanish, but its sounds are familiar to me.  Beautiful even.  German just sounds…odd.  And the rules are confusing.

There are two words for "you".  Sie and Du.  And you better get the context of using them right or you’ll offend someone.  Sie is the more formal.  When in doubt with Germans, use the more formal language.  So Sie is "you".  Except when it isn’t.  Like "excuse me"…Entschuldigen Sie.  I think that’s you excuse me…but I’m not sure at this point.  And…just look at that damn word.  Entschuldigen.  Try to pronounce it just by looking at it.  Go ahead.  Then there is this little oddity: Do you understand?  Verstehen Sie?  I understand.  Ich verstehe.  Verstehen.  Verstehe.  It’s the same word.  But it isn’t.  Or it is but only sometimes.  I see that e – en difference in a lot of German words and I think one pronunciation is when it’s about you and the other when it’s about someone else.  Why?  Just…why?

I’m not complaining.  I’m…puzzled.  And my head just wants to crack it now.  There’s a certain someone down in Florida who I would love to impress by speaking a little German to him next time I see him.  But that’s almost beside the point now.  How the hell do Germans understand each other?  I’m not complaining.  It’s bewildering and I won’t have that.  At some level the rules must make sense to them.  I just don’t get it. 

But that’s where you always start from.  Not getting it.  I have some language lessons on my iPod that I’ve been going over.  And over.  And over.  Two weeks now and I’m still stuck on lesson one.  But I made a conceptual breakthrough of sorts the other day.  I’m not so much learning a new language at this point, as learning some new words.  The language is in the rules…the syntax…the grammer.  I’ll learn that when I get enough new words into my head that I can play with it. 

It’s like music isn’t the notes…it’s the melodies and harmonies.  It’s the song.  I already had two ways to say "excuse me" in English.  Excuse me.  Pardon me.  Same thing, mostly.  Yes, there are shades of difference.  But there it is.  Two ways of saying "excuse me"  Now I have a third way.  Entschuldigen Sie.  Three ways to say it.  Two of them are English, and one is German.  But it’s the same thing.  The point is, you don’t learn the words by linking them to other words (what’s German for ‘excuse me’…?).  You have to link them in your brain to meanings.  Imagine yourself in a situation where you mean to say something…(excuse me)…and then say the new word until it digs into that meaning along with the other words that you know, that express that thing…(Entschuldigen Sie).  Then you’ve got it.  The word that is. 

Language comes later.  Language is how the words make sentances…how they link together to tell you a story.  A language is a way to tell a story.  Entschuldigen Sie.  Verstehen Sie English?  Please…because I only know a few crumbs of German…

Andrew Sullivan posts a YouTube under the heading, The Strangeness of Germans…

You’d think he’s never seen Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. There’s nought so queer as folk Andrew. We Americans have our own strange little ways too. Take a trip into Sid and Marty Kroft land sometime.

You want strange Andrew…? Try a little…Walt Disney? Oh yes. This clip is from Alice in Wonderland, and some of the best animation ever produced. The animator who did the character of Alice was a master…simply a master. But the entire film is a masterpiece of animation. The eye candy is everywhere and it all moves and flows perfectly. This clip from the film starts off being your usual Disney cartoon slapstick but the strange comes in at about 2:15 into it. Remember, Disney did Fantasia too…

I’ll bet if I poked around British movies and TV I could find myself some grade ‘A’ strange in there too. We humans are a funny lot. Strange makes the world go ’round Andrew…

Every time I see this headline scan across my gay news lists I think maybe I’m still asleep and just dreaming that I’m awake and Monday hasn’t really started yet…

Gay Activist Escapes Injury by Runaway Cheese on The Amazing Race

This is why I don’t watch television anymore…

Via Fark…which is a good source for Valentine’s Day complaining…

Stillwater funeral home to host Valentine’s Day dinner for widows and widowers

I’m glad to see the romance is still alive.  So to speak.  And that reminds me…time for some more entries in the poster contest!